She helped land a rover on Mars. Now she's trying to establish the coldest place in the universe.

Aerospace engineer Anita Sengupta hit a career and scientific pinnacle in 2012 when she helped land NASA’s Curiosity science-laboratory rover on Mars. Sengupta, project manager at the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, spoke this week about Mars exploration at the International Software Development Conference in Chicago. She now manages the team that will launch the Cold Atom Laboratory to the International Space Station in 2016. Sengupta, who is of Indian origin, explains why she wanted to lead the project for science and for women and minorities.

Q. In lay terms, what was your biggest challenge in helping to land the Curiosity on Mars?

A. It was development of the supersonic parachute. The hardest part of Mars entry, descent and landing system design is that you can never actually test your system end-to-end here on Earth before you get to Mars. On Earth the gravity is three times what it is on Mars. The atmosphere and composition is totally different, which means that you have to understand the system so well from an engineering and physics perspective that you can predict how it’s going to work and survive with pretty good precision with no redundancy in the system before you ever get to Mars. For me, it was the most exciting thing because it was sending something to a new world in a way we’ve never done before.

Q. You’re now managing the Cold Atom Lab mission that will conduct experiments with gases that are cooled to ultra-cold temperatures in space. What’s the ultimate purpose of this project?

A. It’s intended to perform atomic physics experiments. We’re going to be making the coldest measured spot in the universe. You can get certain classes of particles down to just above absolute zero, which means zero energy; everything has stopped. Our experiment uses this technique called laser cooling, which benefits from being in a zero-gravity environment, which we would get on Space Station to cool things down to a temperature that we’ve never seen before. So we actually don’t know what we’re going to see, which is what’s exciting

A. From a gravity perspective, the movie “Interstellar” helps to answer that question. A premise of the movie was they had to come up with a way to combat gravity. But the question is, “what is gravity?” and nobody actually knows.

Q. How does this Space Station challenge compare to your challenge for Curiosity?

A. For me personally, they’re very, very different because I was leading the development of a single piece of hardware (the supersonic parachute) for the Curiosity mission, where here I’m managing the entire mission. And there aren’t a lot of female project managers, so it’s a way to push forward women in leadership positions.

Q. How many women are you working with?

A. For my project in terms of engineers leading activities, there’s only one in addition to me. There are still not enough female engineers or managers. I don’t know why that is. That’s why I wanted to do the project manager role. I think it’s important for women to take on positions of leadership. If you don’t have enough female role models or mentors, you may not be able to push enough women to get involved in these things. I also teach at USC. We’re not making enough progress to get more females to enroll at the undergraduate level. It all stems from the education system. It’s got to start from the middle and high school level into undergraduate to fix it.

Q. What can be done to attract more women to this field?

A. I knew I wanted to be involved in the space program because I love science fiction. You have to be motivated to do it. That is just exposure to what the job is or why space exploration is exciting and interesting. That means making career options more obvious to kids. I like to attend career fairs in middle school and high school. It should be a required public service. And being a minority and female, I like to do it to because there are a lot of minority school districts here.